We have a rigging toolset that’s fairly in-line with industry standards nowadays. You layout a template skeleton, then convert it to the final skeleton, and then can create a rig that drives your skeleton. It also has functionality to detach the skeleton from the control rig, and re-attach it. Basically these functions just delete the point and orient constraints, and break the scale connection between the control rig and skeleton. All super straightforward stuff.
We’re noticing strangeness when detaching and then reattaching. Prior to the detach all segment scales are setup properly and any scaling functions as expected. When we reattach our scaling does not operate as before the detach, and the appearance is almost as if Maya is ignoring the segment scales despite the fact that all we did was just re-hook up some constraints and input connections. An important note to make is at this stage we have some geometry that’s skinned to the joints that we’ve been toggling constraints and connections on.
Now here’s where things get really strange…if I turn off mesh display in my Maya viewport and perform the same scaling that appears to no longer be working, it starts behaving as expected. For example, I have a hand mesh skinned to some finger joints. Before a detach, scale the wrist, and the entire hand scales up uniformly because of properly setup segment scales. Detach constraints, then reattach constraints, try to scale the wrist with the hand geometry showing in the viewport, and the fingers don’t maintain their segment scales. HOWEVER, turn off the hand geometry and scale the wrist and the fingers go back to adhering to the segment scales. If I scale up the hand with the geo off, the scaling works, then if I turn the geo back on and scale the hand down, the scaling doesn’t work.
I’ve tried duplicating the skinned geo, copying weights over and seeing how that mesh evaluates and it evaluates with the same errors. If I just detach the rig, I can scale the wrist joint and the mesh scales up appropriately, and the hand rig also scales appropriately. Once I attach the two though, which simply just sets up point and orient constraints and scale direct connects, nothing evaluates properly…but only if I’m also displaying meshes.
It’s almost as if some draw functionality or node evaluation gets corrupted in Maya or something during the execution of our code. Has anyone ever seen or experienced anything that sounds remotely similar to this? This is Maya 2014 SP 2.
